The conclusion returns to the book’s central argument – that wardship, the arbitrary burdens it imposed on those unfortunates ensnared, the wider economic costs ensuing, all while producing so little benefit to the Crown, was representative of the wider Stuart state. It is easy to envisage how a nascent industrial revolution might have been smothered by the Stuart fiscal state, perhaps via monopolies being awarded to undeserving favourites, or contracts and property rights being re-drawn to suit the perceived interests of the Crown. Ultimately, the conclusion will make the case that the industrial revolution could not have started in England during the eighteenth century, were it not for the constitutional changes of the seventeenth century.

The ninth chapter expands the analysis to Scotland and Ireland; in both kingdoms, wardship was instrumental in the disintegration of royal power. In Scotland, Charles I’s efforts to re-write the land law and extend his rights to wardships via an Act of Revocation (1633) was considered to be ‘the ground stone of all the mischeiffe that folloued after’ (sic), an arch reference to the rebellion that began in Scotland in 1638. In Ireland, wardship and the entire land law were deployed as a means of religious conversion. Wardship was thus an integral component of the bitter religious conflict that erupted in 1641. It was these rebellions which ultimately precipitated the English Civil War, that offered Parliament the opportunity to finally abolish the feudal tenures in 1646, an abolition confirmed at the Restoration of the Crown in 1660.

The Court dealt with a surprisingly wide variety of cases and for a period, certainly under the Mastership of Lord Burghley (1561–98), usually did so in a tolerably even-handed, equitable, manner. Under the Stuarts, however, as they increasingly sought to maximise their revenues from wardship, so the Court’s legal functions were suborned to its fiscal functions – local juries were strong-armed into finding tenures beneficial to the Crown and producing wardships; previous legal precedent was jettisoned where it was found convenient to do so.

How George Peabody’s firm became ensnared in the panic, jeopardizing Junius’s new partnership with Peabody and Morgan’s training there. The first test of Morgan’s mettle: Could he meet the challenge of a financial crisis? He showed deep empathy and compassion for his father’s anxiety and discomfort as Junius and George Peabody managed their way through the crisis. Father told him in 1857, “You are commencing upon your business career at an eventful time. Let what you now witness make an impression not to be eradicated. In making haste to be rich how many fall; slow and sure should be the motto of every young man.”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, America’s breathtaking economic and territorial expansion furnished the context for a Second Great Awakening, Romanticism, and electoral politicking. These accelerated the ascent of individualism and encouraged self-refashioning to pursue new ambitions. Individuals’ choices inspired stories that reveal how the evolving myth of self-made success both symbolized and widened the nation’s social and cultural chasms. High-profile self-fashionings of the period included Eliza Jumel’s rags-to-riches, Henry Clay’s feigned humble origins, and reformer Dorothea Dix’s discarding of traditional roles. Leading preachers, including Charles Grandison Finney, inspired thousands to take on individual spiritual choices and worldly service, while Romanticists beckoned men to accept heroic self-agency as their duty. Chief among the latter, Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted that American men exert their "self-reliance." Amid all this churning, antebellum storytellers shifted use of the phrase “self-made” from a rhetorical tool for moral judgments to one for increasingly secular accolades, preparing the way for a gradual turn to financial measures of success.

Oliver Cromwell was a stern, Puritan dictator from the seventeenth century, and Kylie Jenner is a twenty-first-century pop culture princess and lipstick mogul. They could not be more different, yet they have in common that they’ve been tagged with the provocative and powerful label “self-made.” Their stories bookend the history of how what was once a sin became an accolade. For Cromwell, a claim of self-making would have endangered his social and political standing, as well as his soul. Jenner, in contrast, proudly accepted this label as a badge of esteem, a reward for being a “selfie-made success.” Over the centuries between them, the concept of self-making evolved, always serving storytellers as a tool for judgment. It became socially and politically destructive along the way because storytelling based on its false assumptions and judgments has fostered policies and cultural attitudes that advance inequality and absolve the affluent of community obligations. Although much of its modern persuasiveness comes from claims that it belongs among core American values, the myth’s history reveals that there is nothing intuitive, stable, or tied to the real world about the idea of self-made success.